Mike Figliuolo – Page 38 – thoughtLEADERS, LLC: Leadership Training for the Real World

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Entries by Mike Figliuolo

Overcoming Challenging Situations through the Power of Storytelling

March 21, 2016 /0 Comments/in Balanced Lifestyle, Books, Communications, Entrepreneur, Guest Blogger, Innovation, Leadership /by Mike Figliuolo

We face leadership challenges every day. Rather than tackle them head-on, sometimes the best way to get your organization to overcome them is through the power of storytelling. Today’s post is the sixth in a series by Paul Smith, thoughtLEADERS instructor and bestselling author of Lead With a Story. You’re busy as a leader. You don’t always have time to invest in learning new leadership skills. I recognize that and I’m here to help. Below are 5 great lessons in easy-to-digest 10-minute podcasts you can listen to at your convenience. These podcasts are based on interviews with 100 executives and leaders at dozens of companies around the world as they learned their most important leadership lessons – sometimes the hard way. They feature stories from executives at Proctor & Gamble, Dollar General, Hewlett Packard, Kellogg’s, Dun & Bradstreet, Saatchi & Saatchi, Verizon, and many more. Each episode brings you an important leadership lesson through a single compelling story. These next six episodes will help you communicate more effectively as a leader through appropriate storytelling and better writing, learn how to create strong and more productive working relationships among your team members, consider an unconventional method to get to ‘Yes’ faster, how brutal honesty can sometimes be the best thing your customer needs to hear from you, and find the courage to make that critical investment even during tough economic times. The intimacy threshold: storytelling differences across cultures Meet an expert storyteller who’ll learned a great lesson about cultural differences in the use of emotions in business stories when one of his best stories fell flat on a new audience.

How do you invest your time and energy in your team members?

March 17, 2016 /0 Comments/in Communications, Leadership, Poll /by Mike Figliuolo

Our reader poll today asks: How do you invest your time and energy in your team members? – I spread it around evenly so it’s fair: 38.53% – I invest more heavily in low performers: 15.58% – I invest more heavily in high performers: 45.89% Change Your View of Time Allocation. Low performers are being shortchanged. Your high performers might not want so much of your time. After all, they’re pretty self sufficient and your “investment” could be seen as “micromanaging” or a lack of trust. You’d be much better off investing your limited “leadership capital” (your time and energy) where it will yield a higher return in terms of improved performance. When you understand the relationship between your investments and team member results and learn to look at it differently, your allocation of time should shift significantly. Do you agree with these poll results? Let us know in the comments below! – Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

How to Harness the 4 Aspects of Focus

March 14, 2016 /0 Comments/in Balanced Lifestyle, Books, Business Toolkit, Guest Blogger, Leadership /by Mike Figliuolo

Multitasking doesn’t work. It’s only through true focus that you can make meaningful progress on your work. By using the four aspects of focus, you can excel at any task you put your mind to. Today’s post is by Achim Nowak, author of THE MOMENT: A Practical Guide to Creating a Mindful Life in a Distracted World (CLICK HERE to get your copy). Let’s face it. Pretty much every facet of our work lives conspires against us staying focused. We rush from one meeting to the next. We have too many emails to answer in any given moment. There are days when it seems we do nothing but respond to last-minute requests and fly by the seat of our pants. And yet, the leader who stays focused is the one who creates exponentially more success. Focus, at its very best, is our exquisite commitment to a goal, and our full engagement with the process of attaining this goal. Before we explore some common-sense focus practices, let go, once and for all, of the notion that multi-tasking works. Yes, you know how to do it. You are likely quite good at it. Research, however, consistently shows that multi-tasking dilutes the effectiveness of the tasks we perform. We tend to confuse motion with achievement. Instead of our relentless focus on achievement, why not focus on the art of focus? One activity at a time is a fine place to begin. Successful focus, however, is defined by the levels of awareness you and I bring to the performance of this single activity. The following four aspects of focus help us shift from the purely transactional performance of a task to a deeply conscious engagement with this task:

How quickly does your organization make decisions?

March 10, 2016 /0 Comments/in Communications, Leadership, Poll /by Mike Figliuolo

Our reader poll today asks: How quickly does your organization make decisions? – Very — we get to decisions quite rapidly: 11.32% – Somewhat — we get to decisions with some delays: 29.11% – Not very — our decision-making process is slow: 43.94% – Not at all — it takes us forever to make a decision: 15.63% Time for a change of style. Part of the reason your decision making processes are slow are likely attributable to the decision making style you’re using. Many times we default to a consensus-based style. It’s inclusive. It gets everyone agreeing. It takes forever because no one ever agrees. It’s also infrequently the best style to choose. If you focus on improving how you choose a decision making style, the speed of your decision making should accelerate. Do you agree with these poll results? Let us know in the comments below! – Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

Leading Your Team through the Balance of Success and Failure

March 9, 2016 /2 Comments/in Communications, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Training /by Mike Figliuolo

Finding the right balance between how you handle success and failure makes a tremendous difference in how motivated (or unmotivated) your team members are. There are some simple techniques for celebrating success and dealing with failure. Apply them and you’ll find your team is happier and more effective. When you lead a high performing team, you’ll face plenty of situations where you’re dealing with success and failure. Success and failure are part of running a team day to day. You need to recognize and promote “wins” because it’s going to build momentum for the team and make them feel like they’re accomplishing great things. When they fail, you need to accept that failure as a learning opportunity and help the team grow. Celebrating Success In terms of celebrating success, there are a lot of great ways to acknowledge success. You can give people bonuses, provide them visibility opportunities, or ensure there’s public recognition of their efforts. You can give people increased responsibilities and even promotions. All of those are very effective ways to celebrate the success of your team members. But remember, just because you think something is valuable doesn’t mean the team member will. You need to understand what personally motivates them, and then reward them accordingly. Because if you’re not thoughtful about it, something you think is a reward is going to be horrible from that person’s perspective. For example, imagine you have someone on your team who is very introverted. They do a great job and you want to reward them. You decide that you’re going to celebrate their success by putting that person on stage in front of a large audience. You then tell them “Here’s your great opportunity to shine and share your initiative with 50 people in the room!” That introvert might really hate […]

10 Steps for Ensuring You Don’t Set Your Leaders Up to Fail

March 7, 2016 /0 Comments/in Books, Career, Guest Blogger, Leadership /by Mike Figliuolo

When you promote top performers to first-time leadership positions, they are faced with major changes. Prepare them with ten components for leadership success. Today’s post is by Edward Brown, author of The Time Bandit Solution: Recovering Stolen Time You Never Knew You Had (CLICK HERE to get your copy). You’re a CEO whose star salesperson just surpassed all records again. When he did it last year, he asked you about moving up the corporate ladder, and you did not discourage his ambition. Clearly, it’s time to promote him to sales manager, so you do. Six months later, you’ve got a problem. Monday/Friday sales meetings are perfunctory affairs, the sales manager is back on the road calling on his old accounts, sales positions linger vacant, veteran salespeople have quit, and two big deals were lost to competitors you usually beat easily. Who is at fault? You. You knew sales manager was a vastly different job from salesperson, but did you make sure your guy was prepared for the differences? His great skill was selling. That’s a transferable skill, but only if he knows exactly how he did it. “I swing hard in case I hit it,” might be a baseball batter’s motto, but you can bet his batting coach could parse everything that batter does right when he connects – stance, posture, mental attitude, line of sight, shoulder turn, wrist snap, and follow through. A recent New York Times op-ed titled, “Rising to the Level of Your Misery at Work” was about people who regret accepting promotions and raises. “Those who love being part of teams and creative processes are promoted to management. Happy engineers become stressed-out supervisors. Writers find themselves in charge of other writers and haranguing them over deadlines… happy professors become bitter deans….” All I could think about […]

How does your organization deal with bad behavior?

March 3, 2016 /2 Comments/in Leadership, Poll /by Mike Figliuolo

Our reader poll today asks: How does your organization deal with “bad behavior”? – We immediately take action and correct/eliminate it: 25.4% – We deal with egregious cases but tolerate it otherwise: 41.01% – We avoid dealing with it and hope it goes away: 21.16% – We have a culture that promotes and rewards it: 12.43% Fix Bad Behavior Fast. There appears to be way too much tolerance of bad behavior with 75% of you fessing up to varying levels of tolerance. The cost of such behavior in terms of productivity, morale, and turnover can be staggering. People don’t like working in organizations where bad behavior is condoned – much less encouraged. I know you can’t change the entire culture on your own but you can start the movement in your own department. Stamp out bad behavior as soon as you see it. That’s the only way things change for the better. Do you agree with these poll results? Let us know in the comments below! – Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

Driving Accountability Through Incentives and Consequences

March 2, 2016 /0 Comments/in Career, Communications, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Training /by Mike Figliuolo

Accountability starts with clear communication around what you expect people to deliver. Once they know what they’re on the hook for, it’s all about using incentives and consequences to drive and reinforce behavior. Accountability starts with clearly defining what you expect people to deliver. Are there numbers they’re supposed to hit? Deliverables they’re expected to complete? Processes they’re supposed to manage? Dedicate time to spelling these expectations out explicitly. Failure to do so isn’t fair to anyone involved. You can’t hold people accountable for performance if you haven’t told them what you expect of them. Once you’ve defined what people are accountable for, you need to drive their behaviors. Incentives are a very powerful way for doing so. Leaders can create incentives for people who over-deliver on their accountabilities. Things like bonuses or promotions can be powerful motivators to drive the behaviors you’re seeking. You can also use punishment or disincentives when people fail to live up to those accountabilities. Meting out consequences, while not enjoyable, is an effective method for changing behavior if you’re not able to get the results you expect by using positive reinforcement. Allow me to offer an example. When I was part of an operating division of a large corporation, we knew very clearly what we were accountable for. We had revenue targets and customer count targets. One year we missed our numbers, and we didn’t get a bonus. It was extremely frustrating. We knew exactly why. We knew what the metric expectation was in terms of customer counts, and we fell short. But it was really difficult watching our colleagues in other divisions get big bonuses that year, because they met expectations. The next year, again, we knew what we were accountable for. The numbers were clearly spelled out, and we exceeded our numbers […]

LEAD – Listen, Empathize, Add value, Delight

February 29, 2016 /1 Comment/in Books, Customer Service, Guest Blogger, Leadership /by Mike Figliuolo

Mercedes-Benz hasn’t only figured out how to build great machines – they’ve also cracked the code on delivering world-class service. By following the LEAD approach, your organization can improve your customer experience too. Today’s post is by Joseph Michelli, author of Driven to Delight: Delivering World-Class Customer Experience the Mercedes-Benz Way (CLICK HERE to get your copy). The first time I met Mike Figliuolo – Managing Director at thoughtLEADERS (approximately 8 years ago), we were both listening to a speaker from the Ritz-Carlton. Across that span of time the world of business has changed dramatically! Innovation and technology have proliferated, consumers enjoy universal access to the Internet, and people are continually connected to one another and their favorite brands through mobile devices. Also in that time long-standing or innovative brands like Radio Shack, Blackberry, or Blockbuster have lost their luster or disappeared altogether. Conversely, other brands like Apple and Starbucks continue to remain relevant to a changing consumer. As products have become increasingly similar and better, today’s great business differentiator centers around the “experience” in which products are delivered. As such, many leaders have been tasked to shift from product-centric to customer-centric cultures and strategies. The path to customer experience excellence is a crowded (a Forrester Research study shows that 92% of leadership teams have it as a strategic priority) and tricky one (the American Customer Satisfaction Index shows consumer satisfaction approaching a 9-year low). So who is making this important transition effectively? What are some of the key behaviors leaders in these brands focus on to succeed when so many others fail? Over the past several years I have been fortunate to work with the senior leadership at Mercedes-Benz USA and chronicle their efforts to take that iconic brand (known for over a century of commitment to innovative engineering and […]

Avoiding the 7 Deadly Killers of Projects

February 25, 2016 /0 Comments/in Communications, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Project Management /by Mike Figliuolo

Most of the major initiatives we pursue are conducted as projects. Most projects blow up. There are seven common reasons our projects turn into dumpster fires. The good news is you can avoid them if you focus on them. Projects go off the rails all the time. Some statistics I’ve seen say only 1 in 8 projects can truly be declared as successes. Why are we so horrible at executing projects especially when we have all these “tried and true” project management methodologies? There are seven deadly killers of projects. Any one of them can undermine your project’s success. The good news is we teach people how to avoid these issues as part of our Project Management Reality course (CLICK HERE to learn more). For the benefit of all my readers, I’ve outlined these seven killers below along with ways to overcome them. 1. Team Disengagement The team is just checked out. Low morale. Disinterest. Apathy. Their work products are late or low quality. To mitigate: ensure your project is listed on their personal goals, get their manager to commit them to the project, and show them how the project benefits them personally/professionally. 2. Sponsor Disengagement The sponsor rubber-stamps decisions, misses meetings, and doesn’t fight for the team to get the resources it needs. To mitigate: get the project listed on their personal goals and explain how the project can advance their personal agenda or standing with in the organization. 3. Steering Committee Disengagement

3 Secrets to Unlocking the Power of Leading by Inclusion

February 24, 2016 /1 Comment/in Books, Guest Blogger, Leadership /by Mike Figliuolo

Chick-fil-A has a special culture and its business performance is outstanding as a result. There are 3 secret keys to unlocking the power of inclusion that drives a great culture. Today’s post is by Dee Ann Turner, author of It’s My Pleasure (CLICK HERE to get your copy). I will never forget my first days at Chick-fil-A’s corporate headquarters. Landing the job was a huge blessing and a personal victory. After two initial rejection letters and about six months of follow-up phone calls, I finally secured my first interview with the company. Four months of subsequent interviews, reference checks, and skills testing later, I had an entry-level position in Chick-fil-A’s human resources department. No one could have possibly known that more than 30 years later, I’d still be with Chick-fil-A, serving as a Vice President. All those years ago, at the company Christmas party about a month after I joined the team, I experienced an introduction to Chick-fil-A founder Truett Cathy’s unique leadership style firsthand. The entire staff was treated to dinner at one of the nicest hotels in Atlanta, and every employee had been assigned a seat. I was dumbfounded when I discovered that along with several other recent hires, I – a brand new, 21-year-old administrative assistant – was seated at a table with Truett. Truett widened his circle to include us that night for several reasons. One was to make us feel welcome. He was always going out of his way to let anyone who crossed his path know that they were valued and respected. “Dee Ann, we’re not really in the chicken business,” he used to say. “We’re in the people business.” But he had another reason for enjoying dinner surrounded by all of our new faces: he used that time to model and explain Chick-fil-A’s […]

Building Your Team by Getting Rid of Your People

February 22, 2016 /2 Comments/in Career, Leadership /by Mike Figliuolo

Bringing people into your team, helping them develop and grow, then moving them to new roles is a great way to build talent and strengthen the organization. To do so, you have to resist the urge to hoard your best people. That’s right. You heard me. Want to build your team? Get rid of the people who are on it. Of course I mean to do so in a good way. Become what I call a “net exporter of talent.” What exactly does that mean? You need to develop your people to the point that they’re ready for new challenges. Build their skills. Make them more valuable to the organization. Grow them and their responsibilities. And once you can stand back and admire the fruits of your labor, send them somewhere else to work. Actually, if you’ve done a good enough job developing them, others will be trying to poach them from your team. Madness you say? Not so fast my friend. The benefits of becoming a net exporter of talent are many. Before we get into them, let me elaborate on how to become said exporter. First, recognize almost everyone on your team wants to grow. Your obligation as a leader is to provide those opportunities and help people succeed in them (check out “But he’s never done that job.” “I know.”). Once you’ve expanded the skills and scope of your team members, you’re ready to begin. Start by talking about how great your people are. Let other managers know you’ve got a fantastic A-player on your team. Give your team members opportunities to shine (see “He knows more than I do”). You’re advertising for them. You’re creating new job opportunities for your people. Once others see how great your people are, the ball is in motion. Simply sit […]